JESSE TREVIÑO, CALO
Renowned Artist, Co-Founder
Una Noche de La Gloria - Contemporary Art in the Cultural Zone

Son of San Antonio, Viet-Nam Veteran, American Hero, Artist - Jesse Treviño has spent his life honoring the City he loves though the creation of breathtaking images which have become inextricably intertwined with the image of San Antonio, Texas.   The level of precision and beauty captured by Treviño on his canvases has led him to be called one of America's finest realist painters and muralists.  Treviño won his first art contest at the age of six (6).  He attended Fox Technical High School where he honed his artistic skills leading to an art scholarship.  The reality of Treviño's amazing talent is made all the more stunning by the series of events that conspired to deprive the world of it.  

While attending the Art Students League on scholarship in New York, with plans to continue his studies in Paris, Treviño received his draft notice for Vietnam.  On February 23, 1967, Treviño was hit by the blast of a booby trap and a sniper's bullet, the 19-year-old lay bleeding in a rice paddy, his body peppered with shrapnel.  Injected with morphine on the battlefield, Treviño recalls his thoughts: "I was thinking about my mother, my brothers, the barrio where I grew up in San Antonio and all those images — 'I want to paint them,' that's what I was thinking: 'If there's any way I can come out of this alive, I'm going to paint those places and those people.' "  Ultimately Treviño lost his right arm and painting hand to his injuries.  Overcoming physical pain and depression he trained himself to paint with his left hand.  He enrolled in a drawing course at San Antonio College and later earned his Bachelor's Degree from Our Lady of the Lake University and a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. 

In 1984, Treviño was awarded the Hispanic Heritage Awards Metal by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in Washington D.C. where he presented a painting of the Alamo to President Ronald Reagan.  In 1994, Treviño's work was featured in a one man show at the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. where two of Treviño's paintings are included in our Nation's permanent collection.  And more recently in 2009, a second major one-man show, a career retrospective at the Smithsonian affiliated Museo Alameda, featured a chronological look at Trevino's work from child prodigy to mature master.  In recent years, Treviño has focused on large scale public art projects such as the nine-story one-hundred foot tall mosaic mural on the facade of Christus Santa Rosa Children's Hospital titled “Spirit of Healing”.  This project and others such as the Velador on the Guadalupe Theater, a 40-foot three-dimensional mosaic dedicated to the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks and his latest work in progress, a 130 foot tall Veterans Monument Tower at Elmendorf Lake in San Antonio’s Westside, are and will be destinations and landmarks in San Antonio for generations to come.  Treviño’s legacy is a testament to his battlefield promise to dedicate his talent to paint the things that really matter to him.  In his own words, "My whole career as an artist is in terms of what kind of things I can do here in San Antonio to make it a much more beautiful place".     Written by Jennifer Velasquez